


Tricks and Treats

by McBangle



Series: McBangle's Check, Please Halloween 2016 [5]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: F/M, Ficlet Collection, Future Fic, Halloween, M/M, Trick or Treating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-24
Updated: 2016-10-24
Packaged: 2018-08-24 08:02:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8364334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/McBangle/pseuds/McBangle
Summary: 13 Days of Halloween, October 24: Trick-or-treatingA look into the future for Bitty and Jack, Ransom and Holster, and Shitty and Lardo.





	

Bitty hands out handmade pastries every Halloween. He has a different theme each year: Dead Ladyfingers, Jack Skellington cake pops, marzipan brains. This year he’s giving out puff pastry mummies. Each one lovingly handmade and frosted, tied up in decorative bags with one coupon for his bakery tucked into each bag.

He makes more and more each year, as word of mouth spreads among the neighborhood kids. Last year, a convoy of parents drove their kids to their neighborhood just to trick-or-treat at their house. He nearly chirped them on it, but he could never turn away someone who appreciated his baking. Anyway, it was good for sales at his bakery. He always gets a healthy post-Halloween boost, and his Thanksgiving orders have doubled each year since he started this tradition.

Bitty always grouses about the amount of time he spends making and bagging the treats, but Jack knows he wouldn’t have it any other way. He puts so much love into every treat.

The new kids to the neighborhood will occasionally whine or ask for candy bars, but the more-experienced trick-or-treaters always shush them. The whiners inevitably return with an apology and a compliment.

Jack takes Madeline and Johnny trick-or-treating so Bitty can hand out treats. Just like every year, the kids beg their Daddy to save treats for them. Just like every year, Bitty feigns shock at the suggestion. “What if I don’t have enough left over for all of the neighborhood children? You can eat my baking every day; you don’t want to deprive some poor child of a Halloween treat, do you?”

Just like every year, Jack knows Bitty’s already tucked away two puff pastry mummies just for Madeline and Johnny.

_X_

Ransom and Holster bicker over the treats every year. Holster insists on full size candy bars (“There’s _nothing_ fun about “Fun Size” bars, Rans!”). Ransom points out the growing rates of childhood obesity and juvenile diabetes and suggests that they hand out apples instead.

“No way. We’re not going to be the neighbors who the parents suspect of putting razors in their kids’ apples.”

“Holtzy, you know most of those razors-in-apples stories were hoaxes, right?”

Holster always wins. Ransom doesn’t _really_ want to give out apples anyway, he just wants plausible deniability so he could put the blame on his husband if his pediatric partners ever find out about the massive chocolate bars they hand out every year. (One year, Ransom had had to bribe a patient with five glow-in-the-dark stickers to keep the kid from thanking him for that year’s jumbo Snickers bars in front of the office manager. He’s not ashamed of it. Well, maybe a little.)

Holster always chats with every trick-or-treater about their costumes, their favorite cartoons, and the best movies of the summer. He recognizes 90% of them, and takes notes on the ones he doesn’t recognize so he can learn more about them.

Ransom can’t believe what an adorable dork of a husband he has. Every year around 10 PM, he convinces Holster to turn off the porch light to make time for some grown-up treats.

_X_

Shitty and Lardo always make the coolest haunted house. Lardo spends weeks designing and installing the decorations, each year more elaborate than the last. This year, she’s adding pants and shoes stuffed to look like a bloody severed lower body poking out of their closed garage door, a Dementor hooked up to a clothesline to swoop down on trick-or-treaters, and half-dozen fluorescent-painted chicken wire ghosts to haunt their copse of trees. Dex even helped her attach one of the ghosts to a small robot so it could roam around the lawn.

“Ha! The Nealys can suck it with their pathetic little sheet ghosts and fake spider webs!” Shitty crows. He may be a Harvard-trained attorney, but he’ll be damned if he doesn’t offend the stuffed-shirt neighbors with the most ostentatious haunted house in the Boston metro area.

It’s Shitty’s policy that every kid who visits their house gets a trick (and a treat as well). He’s particularly fond of the old “fake scarecrow turns out to be alive” trick. He’s done it so many times that only the youngest trick-or-treaters fall for it anymore, but Lardo will probably never convince him to switch up his trick routine.

He gives double treats to any kid who will call him “Mr. Crappy” – so of course they all do. He delights at how horrified their bourgeois parents must be at that.

Lardo doesn’t have the heart to tell him that the neighborhood parents love their haunted house as much as the kids do, nor that they don’t really care what their kids call him. “Hey, whatever floats your boat,” Mrs. Nealy shrugs over mid-day wine and purloined Halloween candy. “Another Twix?”


End file.
